06/04/2020 - Feedback Request - Creature Balance

[Static]

"9) Suggestion: Power attacks instead of charged attacks: I don't see a big difference in end result although it may be more obvious to new players. Both end up with slower but more powerful attacks. Is the suggestion to have a separate icon for a power attack with a time delay? (Kind of like attacks in Warcraft or games like that?)"

For sure the big thing is making it more user friends, easier on new players, so people just do it instead of having to learn it.

It could just be automatic, cuz I really don't think making a icon or turning the game into wow is a good idea.

I think a good solution may be to make it so that if you hold your attack up "like a charged attack would have been" that it "automatically" uses a power attack when you release the swing. This way if you just click on it, it does a fast attack, where as if you hold it up like a charged attack, it would release and use a power attack instead but without the loading bar.

This way if you quickly hit the button, its a quick hit, if you hold onto it, its a power hit.

[MrDDT]

"9) Suggestion: Power attacks instead of charged attacks: I don't see a big difference in end result although it may be more obvious to new players. Both end up with slower but more powerful attacks. Is the suggestion to have a separate icon for a power attack with a time delay? (Kind of like attacks in Warcraft or games like that?)"

For sure the big thing is making it more user friends, easier on new players, so people just do it instead of having to learn it.

It could just be automatic, cuz I really don't think making a icon or turning the game into wow is a good idea.

I think a good solution may be to make it so that if you hold your attack up "like a charged attack would have been" that it "automatically" uses a power attack when you release the swing. This way if you just click on it, it does a fast attack, where as if you hold it up like a charged attack, it would release and use a power attack instead but without the loading bar.

This way if you quickly hit the button, its a quick hit, if you hold onto it, its a power hit.

I think without the loading bar this would not be able to be known to players without some other form of info.
Essentially this way you would have exactly like charged attacks however no loading bar. Which I do not thing is useful and new players would have even harder time learning it.

I think it's better to have it as a special attack where you have a hot key for it. You can even have special skills unlock as you gain levels in the skills. Then you click the hotkey, it does an attack at 150%, then has a cool down of say 5 to 8s (or more whatever is balancing). So they use their normal attacks most of the time, but once in a while they use a special attack of more power. With the cost being extra energy.

[Static]

"10) Suggestion: Remove charged / loading bars: I could optionally turn off the bar for players that find it distracting. Right now removing charged attacks entirely is too big of a task but I could replace charged attacks with a special attack in a later patch (after Pets are out). I want to balance what we currently have so that I can patch Pets and Stables next."

I think removing loading bars, without changing the mechanic wouldn't be a great choice since people wouldn't be able to see the level of charge or loading they have in the bar.

"11) Suggestion: Fight or flight based on power of enemy. It works a bit like that (based on the damage done in one hit) but yes, I can further improve this. I'll put it on my suggestion list for now."

For sure, a rabbit or lower running from someone 200hps would be understandable, but they should be aggressive verse lower hp players that are more of a fair fight, this way new players are not running out of energy trying to run down a kill they can't catch.

12) Making end game creatures easier? I am definitely not doing this.

I am following the goals stated in my initial post and listening to feedback on the current difficulty or ease to make adjustments to achieve those goals. Players are testing different situations and I am balancing for a wide range of toons with different powers.

For sure I don't think endgame should be made easier. I think balance should be for solo fights for all the basic creatures up to and including bears.

I'm not saying make endgame stuff weaker, I'm saying make the weaker stuff slightly tanker instead of making them stronger.

This means that I think low end creatures should be able to survive multiple hits, so that new players actually have the ability to fight something before it dies. Low end creatures should take around as many hits for a new player, with low skill and 25q weapon as a high end player fighting a higher end creature, this means the RATIOS.

So for example, if I'm fighting a bear, I hit the bear and the bear hits me..... It should be around the same percentage of damage taken from my hp as if a new player is fighting a rat or hamster and they should be doing roughly the same percentage of dmg to the rat/hamster as I am to a bear.

This would be a true balance, new players fighting the lowest creatures being the same percentage ratios as the best players with the best gear fighting the highest end creatures (a regular bear since we're talking purely basics and not mutants at this point)

Now mutants is a whole other bag of worms cuz your saying you want them balanced to take multiple people.... but all of them? Like I fought a mutant squirrel today and it only had 160hps, so if your goal was to turn this mutant hornback squirrel into a monster boss, its totally not that... but I'm not totally sure it should be either, I mean, anything smaller than a marmot shouldn't be a "need multiple people as a raid boss" kind of strong imo... but if that is the goal to have even say mutant horned rats to need multiple characters to kill than there needs to be HUGE changes in all mutant ratios.

Really what we should be doing here is seperating what you think should be solo and what you think shouldn't be solo, than figuring out who you think should be fighting those creatures, than balance them based upon who should be fighting them. For sure needs to be a process if we're going to balance all the creatures, otherwise your asking people to hunt down and fight creatures at random and give a opinion based off their stats instead of the stats of who is supposed to be fighting that creature.

13) I removed the hp bar on dead creatures. I don't like it there. At some point I have to make some changes to please myself too. lol

Is the future intention to get rid of the hp bar completely or move it somewhere else?

Could we instead just display their hp number on their hp bar thats above the creature as you fight it?

We wouldn't need the top hp bar at the top of the screen at all if it was just displayed in the creatures hp bar above the creature.

[Static]

I think without the loading bar this would not be able to be known to players without some other form of info.
Essentially this way you would have exactly like charged attacks however no loading bar. Which I do not thing is useful and new players would have even harder time learning it.

I think it's better to have it as a special attack where you have a hot key for it. You can even have special skills unlock as you gain levels in the skills. Then you click the hotkey, it does an attack at 150%, then has a cool down of say 5 to 8s (or more whatever is balancing). So they use their normal attacks most of the time, but once in a while they use a special attack of more power. With the cost being extra energy.

I disagree massively that we should have a 2nd attack that does the "exact same thing" but with additional damage.

If there is a 2nd attack it needs to be different, not just additional damage.

This is why I keep saying power attack, slow swing, haymaker kinda descriptions, I think the swing speed should be reduced by 50% in exchange for the double damage at 150%.

If you have a skill key you just press for the same attack than its not really changing anything aside of giving you more damage and making combat unpredictable... Thats why gangar is banned in gen 1-2 pokemon competitions, you can't react or predict what its going to do in pvp so its not very balanced, thus its added to ban list for alot of competitions, it was on ban list for pokemmo for the longest time till they released later gens *PURELY* due to not being able to properly react to it.

The reasoning is; if you have no idea what is possible, you cannot make a educated choice of what your supposed to do, the logic is exactly the same for a swing that looks like the same swing as a normal one but does double damage, I think its a horrid idea.

If you want more damage there needs to be a risk to equal the reward, that risk is a 50% slower attack for a 100% stronger attack, this seems pretty balanced since its slower so you may miss it, but its stronger so if you do hit your rewarded.

I think having fast attacks and charged attack being the same swing is insanely unbalanced since the DPS ratios are massively different.

"flat damage" should not be the goal, but rather damage per second or dsp ratios, I don't think we should be making the game based on "burst damage" where you unload your attacks quickly and they die, it should be more interactive combat where its back n forth like dark souls.

I'd love some dark souls combat, thats why I suggested the parry change, thats why I think the fast attack change is awesome, these are massive steps in the right direction, but charged attack? This needs to be changed into a slow speed power attack to make sense with the new FASTER PACE style of combat.

Combat is fun, we shouldn't be trying to finish it as fast as possible, so balancing things to die quickly is removing a fun part of the game and making the game less fun by reducing the amount of time it takes to fight someone, your in combat less, you get less adrenaline from combat, some folks really really like that feeling of a fight where they out played a player or a creature perfectly, so there needs to be mechanics in place to actually make the player interact in the fight, reacting to their enemies actions, this is what makes combat fun, not two things hammering at each other till one falls, its all about reactions, thinking, interactions so thats the direction my suggestions are heading, to try and make the game more interactive, reactive, so it actually feels like your fighting something alive or thinking instead of something spamming one attack while you spam your one attack till one of you falls.

Like this game has multi-direction twitch combat, its way more complex combat than other games, yet, its really multiple swing animations doing the exact same attack.....

Maybe we're thinking about this too hard, maybe every directional swing should be its own attack type with its own dmg and swing speeds? You could do the haymaker this way as a stronger slower power attack, while something like your under attack could be your faster straight attack, this is the way kingdom come deliverance does it, they have almost the exact same multidirectional, but each directional is a different attack type depending on how you use it.

[Static]

I'd rather see lost souls combat or kingdom come SKILL BASED combat instead of WoW skill spam combat.

I will legit stop playing if we turn this into WoW instead of something skill based.

[Static]

In lost souls theres a basic skeleton near the start that if your a new player, is a decent fight till you get stronger, it can take a couple hits, deals decent dmg to you and despite the skeleton being low skill, its a decent fight for a new player that doesn't have much user skill.

However later in the game, that skeletons attacks are easily dodged and your so strong you can prob 1hit him at this point.

Thats the kind of balance we need, people need to grow their skills up by fighting something that is equal to where they should be at that point in time, thats the whole concept of balance lol.

[Static]

So lets start going through this.

If hamster is balanced for a player with 25q weapon, 50hp, 5/5 skill for armed/weapon, with 50 str, than we know our "base starting point"

If bear is balanced for a player with 100q weapon, 250+hps, 90/90+ skill for armed/weapon, with 100+ str, than we know our "base ending point"

So this gives us our base starting and ending point for all the solo creatures to be balanced from. From here we just need to create the balance points of what each creature should be fighting player wise, than go from there.

Mutants is another bag of worms entirely, I'm personally on the fence if a mutant horned squirrel should legitimately be a boss or not... but if you DO want to make it a boss, I would think we would need some changes of small mutant creatures in order to turn them into a boss:
1) slower attacks
2) way more hps
3) larger creature size

Right now, mutant small creatures attack too fast to be able to reasonably react to them, plus they have such low hps that anyone who can solo a regular bear can solo mutant small creatures nps... so if the goal is to make it so they cant solo them and require multiple people, than they need to increase massively in hps and I would think creature size as well so that multiple players could hit it without hitting each other.

[Xsyon]

Mutants are still way to easy.

Yup, I haven't adjusted creature stats yet. Now that the player basics seem good I will adjust creature and will post when the Test Server is up with the changes.

Thanks!

[MrDDT]

I'd rather see lost souls combat or kingdom come SKILL BASED combat instead of WoW skill spam combat.

I will legit stop playing if we turn this into WoW instead of something skill based.

I don't know either of those games. But if they are single player or server based (Like 64 man server or 10 man servers etc), you can have more skill based combat in them because you log onto a server near you.
This game has 2 servers. That means anyone outside of the US is screwed, also anyone at the far ends away from Dallas, TX is going be at a disadvantage.

That's the issue I have with directional attacks in Xsyon. Ping and server speed. You can't tell someone is swinging high, then you have little to no time to react because of ping. I have a pretty good ping, many others dont. Most MMO's have this issue.

[Static]

I don't know either of those games. But if they are single player or server based (Like 64 man server or 10 man servers etc), you can have more skill based combat in them because you log onto a server near you.
This game has 2 servers. That means anyone outside of the US is screwed, also anyone at the far ends away from Dallas, TX is going be at a disadvantage.

That's the issue I have with directional attacks in Xsyon. Ping and server speed. You can't tell someone is swinging high, then you have little to no time to react because of ping. I have a pretty good ping, many others dont. Most MMO's have this issue.

I guess your not aware, but the changes to creature migration addressed some core issues that where lagging the server and creature desync issues that prevented ranged combat for example.

Jordi says the new migration patch has mostly fixed or eliminated this problem, try it for yourself, everything is much more reactive, accurate and snappy when it comes to player interactions with other players or creatures.